Unabomber's Criminal Collectibles Up For Auction : NPR Unabomber's Criminal Collectibles Up For Auction Embed Embed Unabomber's Criminal Collectibles Up For Auction Unabomber's Criminal Collectibles Up For Auction Embed Embed Heard on All Things Considered Kathy Lohr The manual typewriter that Ted Kaczynski used to type most of his Unabomb documents, including the "Unabomb manifesto." It was seized by the FBI during a search of his cabin in April 1996. U.S. Marshals Office of Public Affairs/Flickr hide caption toggle caption U.S. Marshals Office of Public Affairs/Flickr 'The Hermit On The Hill' Ted Kaczynski was a brilliant math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who abruptly resigned. In the 1970s, he moved to Lincoln, Mont., where he built a small cabin. Known as "the hermit on the hill," Kaczynski learned to assemble bombs in the woods, and for more than 17 years he sent them to targets across the U.S. — from university professors to computer stores and airlines. Three people were killed and more than 20 injured in the attacks.

In 1995, newspapers published the Unabomber's 35,000-word manifesto that would ultimately lead to his capture. A tip from Kaczynski's brother in 1996 led the FBI to the Montana shack where officials found bombs, chemicals and notebooks full of data about his notorious life. — Kathy Lohr A composite shows the iconic sketch of Ted Kaczynski released by the FBI and, years later, his hoodie and sunglasses, now up for auction. AP/Flickr hide caption toggle caption AP/Flickr A composite shows the iconic sketch of Ted Kaczynski released by the FBI and, years later, his hoodie and sunglasses, now up for auction. AP/Flickr The federal government is holding an unusual auction. It's selling the possessions of criminal mastermind Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. He made bombs in a remote cabin in Montana and sent them across the country targeting scientists, computers and airplanes. Kaczynski's bombs killed three people and injured dozens. Now officials are selling his property online.

The Unabomber eluded federal officers from 1978 — when he sent his first package bomb — until 1996 when a tip from his brother, David, led the FBI to a remote shack in Montana where Ted Kaczynski was arrested. The case was one of the longest and most expensive in FBI history. "It was significant because it terrorized this country for 18 years," says Albert Najera, U.S. marshal for the Eastern District of California. After Kaczynski pleaded guilty to setting 16 bombs and was sentenced to life in prison, the courts looked into disposing of his assets to pay $15 million in restitution. "Now clearly we don't expect to make anywhere close to $15 million," Najera says. "But whatever it is that we get back will, in fact, go directly back to the victims." Article continues after sponsorship Photos: The Unabomber's Personal Effects For Sale The most popular items so far? The iconic hooded sweatshirt and aviator sunglasses depicted in the Unabomber police sketch for so many years, handwritten and typed copies of his 35,000 word manifesto, the Smith Corona typewriter he used and academic records from Harvard.

'Murderabilia' Najera says the Unabomber captivated people because he's one of the country's first modern-day domestic terrorists. Other Auctions Of Offender Belongings Dwight 'Malachi' York "It changed the way that we got on the airplanes. It changed the way that we dealt with mail coming into our institutions," he says. "It was very significant at the time and still is." Some are glad the auction is moving forward. Others aren't happy Kaczynski is getting more notoriety. But it's clear regardless that these "murderabilia" auctions generate a lot of attention. "A lot of these people have found a place in pop culture," says John Hickey, a consignment director with Heritage Auctions. "They transcend quote 'criminals.' " Heritage, based in Dallas, has sold Bonnie and Clyde "wanted" posters, John Dillinger's wooden gun, and letters from Lee Harvey Oswald. Hickey says they're generally high-ticket items. So Who's Buying? "The collectors I suspect are going to be almost universally male — and guys certainly over 40 and maybe 50 and fairly affluent, I suspect," Hickey says.

"And they're going to want to have something that they can pull out at a cocktail party or whatever and make conversation with." In June of 1995, Kaczynski sent his manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future," to The New York Times and The Washington Post, threatening to mail more bombs if the papers didn't publish the manuscript. After much debate — and an FBI recommendation — they published. U.S. Marshals Office of Public Affairs/Flickr hide caption toggle caption U.S. Marshals Office of Public Affairs/Flickr A few crime memorabilia websites already exist, but these kinds of items are not generally available on eBay anymore. David Schmid, a professor at the University at Buffalo, is the author of a book about serial killers in American culture. He says these auctions raise questions about whether they promote criminals — or whether they help the victims. "So people who participate in it are basically having to sort of be honest with themselves and say, 'I'm interested in this material, not for any justifiable reason, just because I find it fascinating,' " he says. "And that's something a lot of people are not prepared to do.

So that's the reason murderabilia and something like the sale of Kaczynski's possessions makes people nervous." Schmid says he has no problem with the sale as a way for victims to get some compensation. The initial bidding on Kaczynski's personal items was slow, but it has picked up. The auction runs until June 2 — and experts say serious bidders aren't likely to get involved until the last couple of days. Ted Kaczynski | American criminal | Britannica.com American criminal Alternative Titles: the Unabomber, Theodore John Kaczynski Ted Kaczynski Ayman al-Zawahiri Ted Kaczynski, in full Theodore John Kaczynski, byname the Unabomber (born May 22, 1942, Evergreen Park, Ill., U.S.), American criminal who conducted a 17-year bombing campaign that killed 3 and wounded 23 in an attempt to bring about “a revolution against the industrial system.” Theodore Kaczynski (centre), the “Unabomber,” following his arrest in April 1996.

John Youngbear/AP Kaczynski was a bright child, and he demonstrated an affinity for mathematics from an early age. He enrolled at Harvard University when he was 16, and he completed his undergraduate degree in 1962. He entered graduate studies in mathematics at the University of Michigan , earning a Ph.D. in 1967 and taking an assistant professor position at the University of California at Berkeley later that year. Kaczynski had never been an especially social person, and at Berkeley he developed a disdain for technology and many of the trappings of modern life. He left Berkeley in 1969 and spent the next few years drifting from city to city. In 1971 Kaczynski and his brother David purchased a plot of land near Lincoln, Mont., and it was there that he would spend most of the ensuing 24 years. Kaczynski lived in a 10-by-12-foot (3-by-4-metre) cabin that he built on the land.

The building had no heat, electricity, or running water, and most of Kaczynski’s time was spent reading books from the local library and composing the early versions of a manuscript that would later become known as the Unabomber Manifesto . In 1978 Kaczynski moved to the Chicago area to take a job at his brother’s factory, and it was during this time that the first of the Unabomber’s 16 packages was delivered. Though crude compared with later designs, the bomb—addressed to an engineering professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.—detonated, injuring a police officer. Kaczynski returned to his cabin in Montana and continued his bombing campaign, primarily targeting universities.

After bombs exploded on an American Airlines flight in 1979 and at the home of the president of United Airlines the following year, federal investigators organized the UNABOM (standing for university and airline bombing) task force, and media outlets later dubbed the suspect in the case “the Unabomber.” The bombs were constructed with such precision that no useful physical evidence remained after each detonated, and the case’s single eyewitness described a man in a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses—an image that was reproduced in a widely circulated police sketch in 1987. Investigators received an unexpected break in the case when, in April 1995, a person claiming to be the Unabomber contacted The New York Times by letter. The individual offered to end the bombing campaign if a major newspaper or magazine published his 35,000-word antitechnology manifesto . While many in the media wondered at the wisdom of acceding to a criminal’s ultimatum, The New York Times assisted The Washington Post with the publication of the manifesto, and it appeared as an eight-page supplement in the latter newspaper on Sept. 19, 1995. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros.

Folds Its Tent David Kaczynski recognized elements of his brother’s writings in the manifesto, and he contacted federal investigators about his suspicion that his brother might be the Unabomber. The tip led investigators to the Montana cabin, where they arrested Ted Kaczynski on April 3, 1996. Upon searching the cabin, they uncovered a mountain of evidence linking Kaczynski to the Unabomber attacks—bomb parts, journal entries describing the targets, and handwritten drafts of the manifesto. Kaczynski was arraigned in California and New Jersey , the locations of his three fatal bombings, and on Jan. 22, 1998, he pleaded guilty to the charges against him in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ted Kaczynski - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) (born 1942). One of the most prolonged and publicized manhunts in United States history reached a dramatic climax in early April 1996, as investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) descended upon a one-room wood shack in a remote area near Lincoln, Mont.

After weeks of surveillance, FBI agents apprehended the owner of the shack, a bedraggled hermit named Ted Kaczynski. A mathematical genius who had once been a university professor in California, Kaczynski would eventually confess to being the mysterious, elusive, and notorious Unabomber, who had waged a 17-year campaign of terror that left three people dead and 29 injured. Article Contributors The Unabomber and Me The Unabomber and me: no parallelograms here By Peter Rosenthal If f is a continuous function defined on the open unit disk in the complex plane, then a boundary function for f is a function on the unit circle that is obtained by taking limits of f along arcs. One of the first theorems of Ted Kaczynski states that a boundary function of a homeomorphism is continuous on the complement of a countable set. We've been bombarded lately with stories about Ted Kaczynski, the loner mathematician who is better known as the Unabomber suspect. I had my own brush with the story of the man in the orange prison garb. It all started April 3.

A caller said he was a reporter from the New York Times and asked whether I was the Peter Rosenthal who had received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1967. I said I was, and the reporter asked whether I remembered a Theodore Kaczynski. This Kaczynski fellow, too, had received a Ph.D. in math at the same university in the same year. And he had just been arrested in the Unabomber case. I thought hard for a moment; the name wasn't familiar. "His Ph.D. supervisor was Allen Shields," the caller continued. "Allen Shields was a friend of mine," I replied. "He died a few years ago." The reporter continued, "Kaczynski wrote a thesis called 'boundary functions' under the supervision of Allen Shields." I felt I should have remembered anyone who got his Ph.D. in 1967 under the supervision of Shields, but I didn't. Over the next days, I got telephone calls from many U.S. reporters ( Washington Post , CBS News , Time -- interestingly, no Canadian media tried this local angle). I still had no memory of Kaczynski.

The reporters wanted any kind of information, but they were particularly interested in the possibility of Kaczynski's connections to left-wing political activity. The University of Michigan was one of the centres of student politics in the 1960s. Students for a Democratic Society, the most important radical student organization in the United States, was founded in Michigan. The first teach-in against the war in Vietnam was held at the University of Michigan; the idea quickly spread across the United States. The years that Kaczynski and I were at Michigan, 1962 to 1967, saw a great deal of student political activity concerning civil rights, the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear weapons, and, most of all, opposition to the Vietnam War. I was actively involved in these student movements and knew each of the several other Michigan mathematics graduate students who were active. Kaczynski was not one of us. There were also questions about the possible relations between Kaczynski's mathematics and the crimes he is suspected of committing. The tone of the questions was insinuating. Reporters were seeking even the vaguest hint that the math mind gone wrong was capable of the most dastardly -- and explosive -- deeds.

In fact, mathematicians in general would be less prone to physical violence than most people. Doing research in mathematics is an intellectual struggle to understand deep logical constructs. Mathematicians are immersed in these constructs, not in the real world of explosives and death. It is extraordinarily satisfying to succeed in proving a new theorem. Moreover, there is a kind of beauty peculiar to mathematics, which mathematicians often describe as "elegance". Whatever the outcome of the Unabomber case, it will be counter-productive for future sleuths to assume that mathematicians are prone to violence. Nonetheless, after the first few calls from reporters, the sense of the absurd did start to take hold of me. I toyed with a more interesting response: "You said that his thesis was entitled 'Boundary Functions.' Ah, that explains it. Mathematicians have known for years that study of that particular topic tends to lead to violence.

"In fact, at the last annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society , in Orlando in January, there was a secret session at which that problem was discussed." I pictured the reporter checking to find that there was indeed a mathematics meeting in Orlando in January, and then printing my allegations together with denials from officers of the American Mathematical Society that there was any secret session on the violent aspects of studying boundary functions. Only one of my (and Kaczynski's) fellow graduate students has been quoted saying he remembers the man in question. Joel Shapiro recalls him as quiet, private and unassuming, and having unusual mathematical ability. Shapiro is himself a fine mathematician, so his opinion of Kaczynski's talent carries weight. However, Kaczynski never really became established as a mathematician. After getting his Ph.D., Kaczynski was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley . Mysteriously, however, he resigned in the middle of his second year and apparently stopped doing mathematics. During his short career, Kaczynski published six mathematical papers.

All but one concerns "boundary functions." There are some important theorems about boundary values of analytic functions but, unfortunately, Kaczynski's work was on a different topic, boundary values of continuous functions. This topic was only of interest to a very small group of mathematicians and does not appear to have broader implications; thus, his work had little impact. Kaczynski might have quit mathematics because he was discouraged by the resultant lack of recognition. He may or may not be the Unabomber; we should be cautious about accepting police "revelations" as facts until we hear the evidence. I wish I could be Kaczynski's lawyer. It would be interesting to discuss both his legal situation and his mathematical papers. There are, however, two insurmountable barriers: I'm in the wrong jurisdiction and Kaczynski hates leftists. Oh well, I'll just have to wait until a Toronto mathematician gets charged with a spectacular crime. Peter Rosenthal is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto and a lawyer with Roach, Schwartz and Associates.

This article appeared in the April 27, 1996 edition of the Toronto Star and is reprinted and corrected with the permission of Peter Rosenthal. Joel Chan A town reflects on 20th anniversary of Unabomber arrest - Chicago Tribune A town reflects on 20th anniversary of Unabomber arrest Ted Kaczynski John Youngbear / AP In this April 4, 1996 file photo, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, is flanked by federal agents as he is led to a car from the federal courthouse in Helena, Mont. Kaczynski is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, for a series of bombings, most through the mail, that killed three people and injured 23 others over 17 years. (AP Photo/John Youngbear, File) In this April 4, 1996 file photo, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, is flanked by federal agents as he is led to a car from the federal courthouse in Helena, Mont.

Kaczynski is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, for a series of bombings, most through the mail, that killed three people and injured 23 others over 17 years. (AP Photo/John Youngbear, File) (John Youngbear / AP) Twenty years after the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, some Lincoln residents remember him as an odd recluse who ate rabbits and lived without electricity, while others say he had a funny, personable side. But all recall the media invasion that followed his capture and turned their small Montana town upside-down. Kaczynski is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, for a series of bombings, most through the mail, that killed three people and injured 23 others over 17 years. His April 3, 1996, arrest in a primitive cabin 75 miles east of Missoula captured the world's attention and brought thousands of reporters and tourists to the sleepy mountain town.

Around Lincoln, the unkempt loner simply known as "Ted" ate rabbits, lived without power and rode his bike to the town's library, the Missoulian reported ( The FBI moved in after Kaczynski's sister-in-law recognized his writing in a 35,000-word manifesto published in The New York Times and Washington Post. Jerry Burns was a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer in the Lincoln area who was recruited by the FBI to help with the arrest. On that day, he walked up to the cabin with two FBI agents and a tactical team hiding in the woods. Unabomber auction handout / U.S. Marshals Service HANDOUT The personal effects of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, will be sold via an online auction by the U.S. Marshals beginning May 18. U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California ordered the sale in August 2010. Proceeds from the auction will be used to compensate Kaczynski's victims. (U.S. Marshals Service) The personal effects of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, will be sold via an online auction by the U.S.

Marshals beginning May 18. U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California ordered the sale in August 2010. Proceeds from the auction will be used to compensate Kaczynski's victims. (U.S. Marshals Service) (handout / U.S. Marshals Service HANDOUT) "I started yelling up to Ted, 'Ted, are you home?' And we got up to the door and heard him scuffling around in there," Burns said. "He was pretty scruffy-looking." Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to duck back inside, where he had a loaded pistol, bomb-making equipment and his journals. "Poor Ted had been eating snowshoe rabbits and didn't weigh much, and the adrenaline was flowing in me so I had to grab at his wrist at the door, and out he came," Burns said. Wendy Gehring, who lived and operated a sawmill with her husband down the road from Kaczynski, said the FBI used her property as a staging area for the arrest. "It took forever for the FBI to get into position. Finally, they gave the OK, they made the arrest, and our mill erupted with FBI agents," Gehring said.

"We went from six people standing on the mill waiting to hear, and they yelled, 'We got him, he's in custody,' and it went to 300 people. There were trucks and RVs and people walking out of the woods. It was insane. People were cheering," she said. Original investigators in 1982 case surprised by development (Steve Schmadeke, Jason Meisner and Christy Gutowski, Tribune reporters) That scene of elation was followed by swarms of reporters descending on their isolated mountainside property. Gehring recalled she was pregnant when she went outside with a shotgun to persuade a television crew's helicopter to abandon an attempt to land in her driveway. "I think they thought we were all kind of a dirty, punk, stupid hillbilly kind of deal," she said. Librarian Sherri Wood probably knew Kaczynski as well as anyone in town from his frequent visits to the library. Wood liked Kaczynski. She said he had a great sense of humor and he befriended her son. She was shocked by his arrest and gave him the benefit of the doubt at first.

"I said, 'Well, he's not the first person to get arrested as the Unabomber, and they had to let the other ones go. So let's wait and see,'" she said. She also remembered the media swarm was followed by tourists who wanted to sit in the chair Kaczynski had sat in and take the books he donated to the library. Two decades later, tourists still occasionally come to touch a shelf that the Unabomber touched. "I really would like to put that to rest," Wood said. "It was a crazy time in our lives. I don't want to revisit it. And I'm glad they'll never let him out again." Associated Press The Unabomber takes on the Internet The Unabomber takes on the Internet Holly Bailey Share View photos From his prison cell, Ted Kaczynski — the “Unabomber,” who terrified the nation in the 1980s and early 1990s — has carried on a remarkable correspondence with thousands of people all over the world. As the 20th anniversary of his arrest approaches, Yahoo News is publishing a series of articles based on his letters and other writings, housed in an archive at the University of Michigan.

They shed unprecedented light on the mind of Kaczynski — genius, madman and murderer. They had wanted to engage with a “deep thinker.” But when a thick envelope showed up one October morning six years ago bearing the return address of the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., professor Maureen Kendrick Murphy and her students at Huntingdon College, a small liberal arts school in Montgomery, Ala., were at first too scared to pick it up, much less open it. It was a letter from Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. A few weeks earlier, Murphy, on behalf of her class, had written to Kaczynski as part of a critical-thinking course in which the students, all freshmen in their first weeks of college, studied the work of public figures, then wrote to invite them to expand on their ideas. They had written to 14 people, including President Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, future Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and the rapper Eminem. And then, at one student’s suggestion, they reached out to Kaczynski.

The class read “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the 1995 anti-technology treatise commonly known as the Unabomber manifesto, and sent a letter to the convicted bomber soliciting his thoughts on how the expanding use of the Internet had affected personal freedom. “Never in the world did I expect him to answer us,” Murphy recalled in a recent interview. “I couldn’t believe it. Why us? Why would he respond to us?” Slideshow: Unabomber – Ted Kaczinski >>> But Kaczynski had replied almost immediately — in a handwritten 12-page letter that included meticulous footnotes and used vocabulary that sent Murphy and her students scrambling for a dictionary. Now on file in Kaczynski’s personal papers at the University of Michigan, the letter was the beginning of an exchange that offers a unique glimpse into the Unabomber’s life as a man who continues to have many opinions on the impact of technology but, occupying the time capsule of a prison cell, has had almost no direct experience with it. Kaczynski was living in a remote Montana cabin without electricity or running water when he was arrested in 1996, at the dawn of the Internet era.

Now held on the most secure unit at ADX in Colorado, the toughest prison in the country, he is on lockdown 23 hours a day with access only to a television, which he refuses to watch. He has never used the Internet and knows only what he reads about in books, newspapers and letters. But that hasn’t stopped him from writing a new book — an update of his 1995 manifesto with expanded arguments and more current references to modern technology. It’s unclear where the project stands. As of last fall, he was still seeking a publisher. ***** One of Kaczynski’s arguments in his original 1995 manifesto was that the expansion of industrial society was giving a false sense of freedom to individuals, because “large organizations” could compromise people’s autonomy. The shift toward computers, he argued, was putting humanity at risk of losing its self-sufficiency, or of forgetting how to think altogether. Writing from his prison cell 15 years later, Kaczynski hadn’t dramatically changed his viewpoint when Murphy and her class came calling.

The Internet had increased “the individual’s freedom of expression in the sense that it greatly enhances his or her ability to send and receive ideas and information,” Kaczynski wrote in his first letter to Murphy, in September 2010. Unabomber Letters Still, he suggested that the “swamping effect” of all that information, much of it unreliable, combined with people’s shortened attention spans, had given “large organizations,” with their vast resources, more power than average people had to exert influence online. But, Kaczynski admitted, there was still much he didn’t know about the Internet. In subsequent letters, Murphy and her students pointed to the power of Facebook and challenged his suggestion that individuals couldn’t command attention and create influence via the Internet, citing people who posted videos that went instantly viral on YouTube. “I have no idea what YouTube is,” Kaczynski replied. What did it mean to go “viral,” he asked. “It sounds as if the phenomena you refer to are what sociologists call ‘fads’ or ‘crazes,’” he wrote, citing an entry on “collective behavior” from the 2003 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

As they read the letter back in Montgomery, Murphy’s students were surprised and amused. In some ways, they knew what it was like to be sheltered. Their small school, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, attracts a student population mostly made up of middle- to lower-class kids from the tiny back-road towns of rural Alabama. But though their own experiences with the outside world had been limited, none of them could really remember a world in which email or social media didn’t exist. To them, Kaczynski’s statement about YouTube was so unusual, a few students later printed up T-shirts with the quote, which they proudly wore around campus. But when Murphy pressed the class on how they would explain something like YouTube to a man who didn’t watch television, had never seen the Internet and spent most of his days confined in a prison cell not much bigger than a bathroom, they were stumped. “They had no idea,” she recalled. ***** Over his nearly 20 years in jail, Kaczynski has been, in some ways, frozen in time.

The former academic, who continues to write essays and letters on the dangers of industrial society, is heavily reliant on doing research the old-fashioned way, through books and periodicals obtained from the prison library or an extensive network of pen pals who share his beliefs. But though he is still resistant to technology and preaches about its dangers, he has slowly come to embrace some aspects of 21st century communications, albeit in his own way. To save money on postage and the time it takes to hand-copy letters — since he has no access to a copy machine — he has asked many of the people who regularly correspond with him for their email addresses to share with others in his network. Sometimes Kaczynski mails one person a letter and then asks them to scan and share it with the group. Others hold copies of his vast collection of writings and, like a library, send portions to people at Kaczynski’s request. His letters indicate he has considered posting his writings on the Internet. But he’s worried it might prompt prison officials to limit his ability to write letters. When a pen pal once proposed setting up a Facebook page for him, Kaczynski resisted. “I know so little about Facebook.

But my initial reaction is strongly negative because the little that I do know suggests that Facebook is mainly a place where adolescents (of any age) post narcissistic self-advertisements in an attempt to make friends via the Internet,” he wrote in June 2010. Yet years later, when trying to learn more about the motivations of those who had written to him or track down someone he hadn’t heard from in a while, he asked one longtime correspondent to look up people on Facebook and report back. In response to people who write offering to obtain books for him, Kaczynski regularly sends them to Amazon.com. In 2010, a book of Kaczynski’s collected writings, including the manifesto, was released. The newly published author, in a move that would please a publicist, if he had one, regularly promoted the book to those who wrote to him, directing them to the publisher’s website and to Amazon. A pen pal printed out the book’s Amazon page to show Kaczynski some of the reviews he had been getting. He closely scrutinized the page, including the list of vendors who were offering copies of the book for sale through the site.

Like other e-commerce pages, Amazon rates sellers with stars based on customer-service reviews, but Kaczynski didn’t know what any of it meant. He drew a copy of the page — saving the original — and mailed it to a confidant. “What do these numbers mean?” he asked. ***** When her students first raised the idea of writing to the Unabomber, Murphy, a chemistry professor at Huntingdon, wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. Many of the kids were too young to remember the horror of Kaczynski’s crimes, how his mail bombs had gripped the nation in fear. She was skeptical of sending a letter to someone who had killed three people with no remorse, but as an academic, she was curious about him. What would he say about technology all these years later? While the students wrote the initial letters to the others on their list, Murphy insisted that she should be the one to contact Kaczynski.

She didn’t want the kids ending up, as she put it, “in some Department of Justice file.” But when a student who worked in the school’s mailroom told her a few weeks later that she had a thick letter from Kaczynski sitting in her mailbox, Murphy didn’t believe her. The letter sat there eight days before Murphy, still thinking it was joke, sent the girl to pick it up. “I’m scared,” the girl responded. Murphy pointed out that it was unlikely Kaczynski could have sent her a bomb from prison, but allowed a classmate — a member of the football team — to accompany the girl. When they returned to class with an envelope, Murphy was as stunned as anybody. The teacher and her students stared at the document for several minutes, taking pictures with their cellphones and studying Kaczynski’s perfect handwriting and the combination of stamps adding up to exact postage to the penny. The envelope, apparently inspected by prison officials, had already been slit open. View photos Letter addressed to Unambomer Ted Kaczynski professor Maureen Kendrick Murphy. (University of Michigan) More Still, as she moved to pull the letter out, “my hands were shaking,” Murphy recalled.

“Not because I was scared, but because, my gosh, something about it felt historical. ... He was the first person who had written us back, and everybody wanted to hold it and touch it. This was a letter from someone they had read about.” But she was quick to remind the students who it was they were corresponding with. “Remember why this person is in prison,” she said. Over the next three months, Murphy, on behalf of the class, exchanged several letters with the convicted bomber debating the power of the Internet. Kaczynski maintained he could not see how an individual or a small group “could exert a purposeful influence” over the Internet that would have real impact on the lives of average people. But in a letter a few weeks later, he wavered. He wrote Murphy to say he had read an article in the Atlantic about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and conservative activist Andrew Breitbart and their use of the Internet to disseminate previously concealed information. He thought these could be examples of using the Internet in a truly influential way. Still, Kaczynski was torn. Were they influential if what they did had no concrete impact?

“More often the revelation of public information merely gives rise to a public scandal that soon blows over and doesn’t really change anything. Maybe some politician’s career is ruined, but he’s soon replaced by another politician,” Kaczynski wrote. “So one has to ask, how much influence does Assange really have? That’s a question I can’t even begin to answer.” Murphy and her class marveled at how logical and sane Kaczynski’s letters were for someone who had been described as a madman. “If he were on the Internet,” one student told her, “he would have millions of followers on Facebook.” When Murphy took one of the letters to a logic professor at the school, he was equally surprised. “This is how you would teach somebody to argue,” he told her. ***** As the class wrapped up that semester, Kaczynski sent Murphy another note saying that she and her class were among the “small, precious minority” who had offered “worthwhile comments and questions or challenged my arguments intelligently.” It was a rare compliment from Kaczynski. More Murphy and her students were flattered, but the class was over. She never replied to the letter, and Kaczynski never wrote to her again.

But last July, five years later, Murphy received an email from a woman she didn’t know. “Ted said you might enjoy reading this,” the woman wrote. “Please do not distribute.” “Ted?” Murphy thought. “Who is Ted?” At the bottom of an email was a link that would expire in less than 24 hours. When she opened the document, she found a scanned copy of a new book by Kaczynski called “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.” The manuscript was neatly typed, and scattered throughout the text and along the margins was Kaczynski’s familiar perfect handwriting, offering meticulous editing notes and changes. According to Murphy, who has agreed not to make the document public until it is published, the book is an update of the 1995 manifesto — articulating many of the same arguments but containing more current references to computers and the Internet. In the preface, Kaczynski acknowledges that in writing the book he had to rely on sources of “doubtful reliability” like media reports because of his limited access to the outside world.

The book, Kaczynski writes, “is to be studied with the same care that one would use in studying, for example, a textbook of engineering.” The ideas, he adds, “need to be applied thoughtfully and creatively, not mechanically or rigidly.” In reading the manuscript, Murphy detected subtle changes in the Unabomber’s philosophy — including no mention of violence, though it’s unclear if that represented a change of heart or was adopted by necessity since prison officials would likely block publication. According to Murphy, the book is more thoughtful about the “revolution” Kaczynski has long encouraged and suggests alternate methods of protest, like learning more about coding and other computer programming in order to match the smarts of one’s opponents. Technology, he writes, will end up destroying itself. And that risk is why he feels urgency about getting his message out to the world. “I’m 72 years old,” Kaczynski writes in the preface, according to Murphy.

(He’s now 73.) “And I could be put out of action at anytime by some medical misfortune, so I want to get the most important material into print while I can.” Read more in this Yahoo News Special Report: >> Ted Kaczynski - The Unabomber - An Infamous Sociopath Ted Kaczynski - The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski - the Unabomber. Stephen J. Dubner / Hulton Archive / Getty Images An intense love of self, lack of empathy for others or respect for the law, and tendency toward manipulation and violence are hallmarks of sociopathic behavior. We looked at three infamous sociopaths in another article: Bundy, Mengele and Hossencofft . Now we’ll take a look at some of the most severe cases of criminal sociopathy. Better known as the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski murdered three individuals and injured 23 more in a bombing spree that lasted 20 years. Intelligent but not outgoing, Kaczynski graduated Harvard as a mathematician and began a career as a professor, but he couldn’t connect with his students and hated giving lectures.

He abandoned humanity and went to live in the woods as a recluse in 1971. The time in isolation didn’t seem to do him much good. By the time he rejoined society in 1978, he had developed his own personal philosophy of anarchism and began sending bombs through the mail to seemingly random targets in Universities and Airlines (resulting in the Unabomber moniker). He was meticulous in the manipulative methods he used in covering his tracks, going so far as to take random bits of hair from the floors of bathrooms stalls to put into his bombs just to try and throw police off with random genetic information. Upon his capture, his personal journals (some 40,000 pages) were filled with details of his exploits and his desire to be able to kill more people. He was frustrated with his inability to cause more lethal damage, and was forever searching for a better, sneakier bomb. Showing no remorse for his victims, he instead expressed joy when he succeeded in murdering others, and refused to allow his defense team to enter any kind of insanity plea. Other articles in this series: Dennis Rader - The BTK Killer Dennis Rader - the BTK Killer.

Getty Images News / Getty Images Dubbed the BTK Killer, Dennis Rader showed a chilling lack of remorse in confessing ->) his crimes once he was finally captured and tried for the murders of ten people (confession transcript). In fact, he seemed infuriated when some of the murders weren’t attributed to him, and began filling in details of the killings to assuage his own bruised ego. Before he was captured, he was described as ruthless, overzealous, and arrogant in his jobs, which were frequently positions that allowed some authority over others. Though he feared the law, he did not respect it. The only thing that slowed his killing spree was fear of capture, caring nothing for the pain he was inflicting on others and feeling no guilt. He reveled in the spotlight, and frequently taunted police (news compilation of articles where he taunted the police with various letters/evidence with letters about his crimes, and even praising the crimes of others. He suggested his own name, BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill), showing that he clearly was taking pride in what he saw as his accomplishments. His need to take credit is what got him caught, sending a floppy disk to police that traced back to his church.

Other articles in this series: Dean Corrl - The Candy Man Dean Corrl - The Candy Man. Dean Corrl – The driving force behind the Houston Mass Murders, Dean Corrl was fondly known in Houston, Texas as the Candy Man, because he would give out free candy to children from his mother’s sweets shop. Little did residents know that Dean had a darker taste for children, eventually discovered as having raped, tortured, and killed at least 27 young boys. Incapable of holding any normal relationship with other people, Dean resorted to savagery as his only means of connection with other people. Over time, he accumulated two accomplices who helped him torture his victims, sometimes keeping them captive for days before finally killing them. But Dean had no sympathy even for his fellow killers, and soon his wrath turned upon them when they refused to continue with his mad games. That mistake cost him his life, when his accomplice Elmer Henley put a bullet in Corrl’s head after refusing to rape and torture his own fiancée.

Other articles in this series: After Two Decades in Prison, ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski Wants to Talk — Read the Hand-Written Letter He Sent to Reporter – TheBlaze Tweet Ted Kaczynski, better known as the “Unabomber,” recently reached out to a select group of journalists, telling them that he’d agree to be interviewed under very specific conditions. Kaczynski, a convicted domestic terrorist and anarchist who engaged in a nationwide bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995 that left three dead and 23 injured, sent a hand-written note to New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright. Wright tweeted a photo of the note Kaczynski sent from the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, where he began serving his first life sentence in 1998. The Unabomber reached out. Thanks, Ted, you're not nuts at all.

pic.twitter.com/enTCOO02MI — Lawrence Wright (@lawrence_wright) May 22, 2016 “In order to determine who will get the interview, I am asking you to write me back affirming that you understand that I am not mentally ill as my brother, Dave, would have you believe,” the note, which was dated April 4, read. David Kaczynski, 66, helped investigators identify his older brother Ted as the “Unabomber,” bringing the 16-bomb rampage that lasted nearly two decades to an end. “The Unabomber reached out. Thanks, Ted, you’re not nuts at all,” Wright tweeted Sunday. After receiving criticism for displaying a lack of sensitivity, the writer later apologized for being “unnecessarily snarky.” After consideration I agree with my critics that my response to the Unabomber was unnecessarily snarky. His mental illness is sadly evident. — Lawrence Wright (@lawrence_wright) May 23, 2016 Kaczynski specified in his letter that he would grant only one interview and that the interviewer would have to confirm that he is not crazy.

After apologizing for the initial tweet, Wright clarified to his followers the he will not be conducting that interview. For the record I'm not interviewing Unabomber, stop asking! — Lawrence Wright (@lawrence_wright) May 24, 2016 Kaczynski was captured and arrested in April 1996, after which he was convicted and sentenced to four life terms.

Question: By what name is Ted Kaczynski better known?
Answer: The Unabomber